Ragai
The Ragai are a race of large, highly adaptive arthropodic insects hailing from the planet Tyranus. The Ragai are predominantly divided into dozens of sub-species which effectively fill different roles within their hive society, and possess a singular hive-mind which links each member to a collective conciousness. Overview Having originated on the planet Tyranus, the Ragai have since spread to thousands of other worlds either through spaceborne eggs or hitch-hiking aboard space-craft, often multiplying exponentially and driving many local fauna to extinction. They are highly voracious creatures, and despite lacking sentience individually, they have been known to thrive in most planetary environments without difficulty due in part to their hive-mind conciousness (affording them with a collective intelligence accumulated from their predecessors and other members of their race) and their extreme adaptivity, whereby they are rapidly mutated or physically adapted to better thrive in the local environ. This adaptivity has led to the extreme diversity of the Ragai race, and various sub-species suited to aquatic and even aerial environments have since evolved from the common Ragai; it is also noteworthy, however, that each member of the various Ragai sub-species are still bound to the same hive-mind, uniting even evolutionary derivatives with the common Ragai race. Ragai society is centered around the universal guidance of their collective hive-mind, which, through the collective knowledge of countless generations of Ragai predecessors, effectively steers each member of the race toward mutually beneficial activities. This universally shared conciousness ensures that no fighting occurs among fellow Ragai individuals, and its collective knowledge helps the Ragai endure as a species, by providing each member of the race with a continually increasing sagacity. Ragai communities in themselves are centered around massive hives, which can range greatly in size, from 2,000 to even 10,000 metres in height, each of which develops relatively independently. Each hive possesses a single Ragai Queen at its core, which serves primarily as a producer of offspring, around which the rest of the Ragai hive is built; a plethora of Ragai sub-species and adapted derivatives fill an abundance of different roles within hive society, ranging from foraging workers to farming workers, who cultivate gardens of edible flora to ensure a continuous supply of nourishment. Others include workers maintaining the physical hive infrastructure, soldiers protecting the hive itself, and specialized nurses, which care for and feed the abundance of grub-like offspring in the hive, although literal thousands of different Ragai strains exist, each with a highly specific role in the maintenance of the hive. In more recent times the Ragai repeatedly came into contact with the species; these contacts always spun into conflicts, however, and at times full-scale wars. Following the Yanme'e assimilation into the Empire of the Covenant these conflicts became increasingly one-sided, as Imperial military support of Yanme'e forces and systematic slaughter led to the decimation of Ragai hives on thousands of worlds. By the end of the Human-Covenant War the Ragai would be a highly endangered species, only flourishing with post-war aid by the UEG and .